membership fees

www.readwriteweb.com

App.net has so far raised nearly $800,000 in membership fees with the promise that it will be a non-commercial, user and developer-friendly version of Twitter. It's off to a good start, with early adopters enthusiastically kicking the tires of App.net's alpha service and (perhaps more importantly) its API. But there...

allthingsd.com

Got a mobile broadband device that you only really use a few times a month? Me too. If you’re sick of two-year contracts and monthly fees that go mostly to a gadget that sits idle in your bag until you’re out of range, there are a couple of different alternative...

techcrunch.com

One of the most interesting startups to appear at the Slush conference in Helsink this week was Holvi. Not a million miles away from Bank Simple, seed-funded Holvi plans to attack traditional bank accounts with a super simple service which also gives the account holder a tonne of tools traditionally...

torrentfreak.com

Over the past years several file-hosting services have been taken to court in the US, the most notable being Megaupload, RapidShare, Hotfile and Oron. While these cases differ in nature, all companies have been accused of facilitating copyright infringements through their services. FileServe is the latest cyberlocker to run into...

thenextweb.com

Editor’s note: This look at new children’s money startup KidsCash originally published by Israel’s NoCamels blog. If today’s kids are the Wall Street traders of the future, let’s hope they are better prepared than their predecessors. Israeli startup KidsCash is trying to teach monetary responsibility to kids in a fun and understandable way. The...

www.guardian.co.uk

The annual schmoozefest for the world's movers and shakers will again be male-dominated. What is its excuse?Facing up to reality, especially in these dark days of the year, can sometimes be exhausting. So I like this new work by the Itinerant Museum of Art (ItiMa), a sort of pop-up show,...

www.businessinsider.com

After living in New York for a few years, the only thing I find it impossible to adjust to is shelling out $13 to $17 every time I want to see a new movie. So when Business Insider's Kevin Smith raved about MoviePass, a new app that lets users see...

arstechnica.com

Kim Dotcom yesterday announced that the Mega storage service is now accepting payment via bitcoins, an encrypted, peer-to-peer digital currency that isn't backed by any government. While Mega allows free access to 50GB of storage, there are payment plans allowing anywhere from 500GB to 4TB. The exchange rate for one bitcoin is...

gigaom.com

Dalton Caldwell’s audacious proposal for a paid, open developer ecosystem called App.net has already started shaking things up in Silicon Valley, as Caldwell tries to capitalize on developer frustration with Twitter to propose a new business model for an information system. While App.net remains fairly new at this point, Caldwell took another step further in...

thenextweb.com

Alibaba.com, the flagship company of China’s Alibaba Group and a massive provider of e-commerce solutions for small businesses, took a serious but not entirely unexpected hit in terms of net profits in the first quarter of this year. Compared to Q1 2011, Alibaba.com’s net income dropped 25 percent to MB339.2...

paidcontent.org

UK online publishers will take further hope that the VOD regulatory regime against which they have campaigned will be dismantled, after another of its decisions was overturned by its own parent. The Authority for Television On Demand (ATVOD) had earlier ruled that, by allowing its satellite TV subscribers to watch...

www.guardian.co.uk

Powerful telescopes at some of the best observing locations in the world are waiting to take your stargazing instructions"Get out and look at the stars!" is the annual call of the BBC's Stargazing Live, but if the sky is overcast you could do something even more awe-inspiring. You could instruct...

venturebeat.com

Less than one year receiving $30 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, shoe-of-the-month company ShoeDazzle is dropping its subscription payment model and announcing impressive new user-numbers. When it was founded two-and-a-half years ago by serial entrepreneur Brian Lee, ShoeDazzle set-up shop with a unique payment structure for an online fashion...

betabeat.com

It's a hard truth confronted by many a would-be world-changing entrepreneur that the industries that seem most ripe for disruption are also the businesses most heavily regulated, putting that dream of a tech company that revolutionizes education or health care or transportation a little farther out of reach. So what's...

www.theverge.com

In a bid to bring more gaming titles to the PlayStation Vita and PlayStation-certified devices, Sony has dropped publisher license fees worldwide, allowing developers to launch titles on its PlayStation Mobile platform at no cost. Game makers were previously required to pay a $99 annual fee to publish titles,...

venturebeat.com

I’m a big fan of business networking (and I’ve even written a book about it!), but there’s often a misconception that networking events have to be big business card exchanging bonanzas. Don’t get me wrong, business cards are a valid way to exchange information, but networking events should be...

thenextweb.com

Just two days after car rental giant Avis Avis acquired Zipcar for $500 million, the car-sharing company has announced a new weekday driving program called the Access Plan, which is offered sans annual membership fee, and is being rolled out initially as a pilot program in Toronto and Vancouver, Canada. Founded...